James McBride

McBride was a working jazz saxophonist and a newspaper reporter before The Color of Water, a memoir about his mother, a white Jewish woman from the American South who married two Black men, raised twelve children in Brooklyn housing projects, sent all of them to university, and refused for years to say where she came from. The Good Lord Bird, narrated by a boy who joins John Brown while disguised as a girl, took a National Book Award. Deacon King Kong turns on a shooting in a 1969 housing project. He still tours with a band.